Of Forests and of Farms: On Faculty and Failure

Author: Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2020)

Edition of 1,000

What do plants want, and where within our bodies might we know it? Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves’s bibliomantic excursion unearths pastoral metaphor in books she used to inspire, direct, and reflect upon her performance “unschoolMFA” (2012–2015). If you see me, and I am glowing, it is because I did not let my first teachers kill me. An ouroboric Blackness traverses a settler fantasy of The Cultivated Wild. A fable of fruit trees and alphabets to feed a wilderness that refuses its name. Take good care / to shape with language / worlds that want to hold us all.

This pamphlet is part of UDP’s 2020 Pamphlet Series: twenty commissioned essays on collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing. The pamphlets are available for individual purchase and as a subscription. Each offers a different approach to the pamphlet as a form of working in the present, an engagement at once sustained and ephemeral.